Radiation therapy involves medical procedures that selectively expose certain areas of a human body, such as cancerous tumors, to high doses of radiation. The intent of the radiation therapy is to irradiate the targeted biological tissue such that the harmful tissue is destroyed. During radiation therapy, a radiation source may be rotated around a patient to deliver radiation from different angles to a target region inside the patient. The radiation source may be mounted on an arm or a ring gantry. In certain radiation therapy, the patient support system may also move. Despite careful treatment planning, during a medical procedure, a collision may occur between a moving part of a medical device and a patient. For example, the gantry of the radiation therapy machine and the patient may possibly collide during radiation therapy treatment. As the dose delivery plans become more complex, the combination of a rotating gantry during treatment and imaging; and couch movement for non-coplanar beam delivery has increased the chance of potential collisions.
Also, in some cases, it may be desirable to monitor a patient's movement (such as breathing, twitching and relaxation) during a radiation therapy treatment. For example, a patient's breathing state or patient motion, due to relaxation, may shift the position of the target. may be used to gate the delivery of the radiation beam
There are existing products for performing specific functions during a radiation therapy treatment. For example, there are products for monitoring collisions, monitoring patients, and determining movement and breathing, respectively. Bar-coding, biometrics, and RFID are used for patient and user identification, user rights authentication, tracking, and device and accessory verification. Software algorithms that support collision detection and avoidance may be built into some linear accelerators. Also, there are existing technologies for distance measurement, code reading, three-dimensional digital image rendering, three-dimensional device modeling, robotic motion management, providing context sensitive responses, recording patient history, providing image records, auditing user actions and tasks, respectively.
In the current state of technology, in order to achieve some or all of the above functionalities, multiple technologies, systems, applications, hardware and software are required. These multiple technologies, systems, applications, hardware and software may be developed by different companies, and are incompatible with each other. Also, these technologies would necessarily work independently or external to each other due to the targeted nature of the technology. As a result, user interaction would be different depending on the task to be performed or functionality to be achieved. This causes user confusion and device complexity in a mission critical environment which cannot accommodate this burden.
Applicant of the subject application determines that it may be desirable to have a new system or methodology for patient identification, patient authentication, authentication of user of medical device(s), object (device and/or person) verification, object tracking, patient data measuring, medical data interpreting, collision avoidance, recording and auditing of medical data (such as human action and motion, machine action and motion, equipment action and motion), and/or any combination of the foregoing, in a medical process, including but not limited to oncology evaluation, diagnosis, treatment planning, treatment simulation, treatment, and follow-up process.